This invention relates to a traveler cart having a support surface or deck suitable for supporting, storing, and transporting electronic equipment. Such carts are used to transport television monitors, audio-visual recording or playback devices, projectors and other materials in many commercial, school and home settings. For example, hospitals use these carts to keep emergency monitoring equipment in mobile readiness.
A typical cart in use today is carried on four swivel wheels, stands approximately four to six feet tall, and has three or more square or rectangular decks or shelves and a top deck. The top deck may have low retaining walls or rails to help stabilize the load, and often has some kind of rubberized pad or other non-skid surface. Alternatively, corner support posts may extend above the deck for this same purpose. Typically, the corner posts or low retaining walls or rails, function as the only structures acting to prevent the equipment carried on the top deck from shifting or toppling.
Transporting expensive audio-visual or other sensitive electronic equipment with such traveler carts heretofore has been at best precarious. Equipment on such carts tends to shift position and to topple. Innovative users of these carts have thought to employ loose belts, thongs and other tethers to either harness or bind the articles being transported to the cart, but these attempts have met with limited success.
Belts or other thongs securing the equipment tend to obstruct access to the controls of the equipment or block access to vital information. Belts and other cinctures are, as a consequence, generally used to harness equipment by attaching the belt to the side margin of the deck surface on one side, drawing the belt up to one side of the article, over and across its top, and then down again to the opposite side margin of the deck surface on the other side. The cincture and the top of the traveler cart thus form a trapezoid. Movement of the article is restricted primarily as a result of the friction created only between the cincture and the top of the article and between the bottom surface of the article and the top surface of the deck. This arrangement has been found inadequate to stabilize many large, top-heavy, or bulky pieces, such as certain television monitors. Moreover, straps drawn from the side margin of the deck surface may obstruct and limit use of the unoccupied portion of the surface.
In response to those shortcomings, creative users of the travelers carts have sought the desired stability by tying down the equipment using binders attached directly to the equipment at several points. But tie-downs too have disadvantages. Electronic equipment is often without securable appendages or recesses necessary to make for easy cinching. Additionally, tie-downs require the use of several discrete ties and are difficult to use and store. Lastly, tie-downs suffer from some of the same problems found with the harnessing cinctures described above. Both tie-downs and cinctures obstruct a portion of the support surface, thereby making it largely unusable. More importantly, neither the tie-downs nor cinctures described provide for the desired degree of immobilization of the article and security against toppling.